Gravity is Heartless

by Sarah Lahey

  “Come here,” Quinn commands. “What’s your programming?”

  It scurries over. “I have probabilistic reasoning—a subsumption architecture system. It allows me to be reactive and make intuitive decisions. I am a parallel system, not a serial system. My memory and processing are connected. I am able to multitask.”

  “Why are you a parallel system?”

  “Modeled on humankind. I will evolve and learn. I am still young. I will need time to develop. Today, I am twelve.”

  Twelve! Seriously. She doesn’t need a twelve-year-old, or an evolving intuitive system. She already has one of those inside her head. She wants number crunching, data, facts, figures, rational decision-making, and access to all layers of NIoT and the SpinnerNet. Quinn is disappointed. She was hoping for a Quantum Machine (QM); this AI is slower than a conventional module.

  “Do you have a scanner? SQUIDS?”

  “I am a fully coherent macroscopic object. Magnetic field thirty-two tesla.”

  At least that’s something. “Impressive. Metals?”

  “Niobium-tin.”

  “Okay. Do both my arms, right one first, then report on the findings. You can do that?”

  “Yes.” He stands upright, head poised and squints. “No physical problems detected.”

  “Now the left.”

  “Inflammation, broken capillaries, ruptured small blood vessels. Some blood leakage into tissue. No major nerve damage; your neurons are firing. I am detecting a problem in the supplementary motor area inside your brain. A neurological problem, damage to the motor cortex and medial frontal lobe, affecting signals to your left side.”

  “Shit. Why can’t it be a physical problem, not something inside my brain? Can you fix it?”

  “No. You will need a neurologist.”

  “Can you recommend one?”

  He stares vacantly around the room. “Mmm, I do not, I do not think so, I am not, not programmed for that. Mmm, there is a medical center on Level Three. Open seven days a week, Monday to Friday between eight and ten and Sundays eleven to six. Today they have appointments at ten fifteen, twelve thirty, and—”

  “Okay, that was a joke, I’ll sort it out. Now, I’m changing your name, you’re called”—she scans the room—“Clair.” Rhymes with chair.

  “That is a female name.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “That is not my name. I am a male meerkat.”

  “Actually, you’re a robot. But fair enough, what about—”

  “But I was born with a name: Mori. I have been called Mori my whole life.”

  “You weren’t born.”

  “It means something. It is who I am. Does your name mean something to you?”

  “That’s different.”

  “I have an identity, I am Mori. You are Quinn, and I am Mori.”

  Too hard. “Forget the name change. Make an appointment for me at the Medical Centre.”

  He stands upright, head poised, and squints. “Mmm, two fifteen appointment to see a diagnostic nurse. No neurologists. Also, I see you need a haircut. I am programmed for that.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm. Downloading styles.”

  Quinn sits, and the AI stands on a chair. She’s nervous, but it can’t look any worse than it already does.

  Mori the AI takes total control. He knows what he’s doing—short around her ears, with a cropped fringe. After it’s done, Quinn stares at her reflection in the glass and sees someone else, someone different. Thank the lordt I’m no longer that person, I don’t want to be her anymore.

  He offers a head massage at the end, using a firm kneading technique that Quinn finds divine, seriously divine; what he can do with those little paws is quite remarkable.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “Thank you for saying thank you.” He waits awkwardly beside her.

  “You don’t need to say that. If I say thank you, you don’t need to say thank you back.”

  He stares at her.

  “Go.” She nudges him away. “Go explore, whatever you need to do, but stay out of my way or I’ll drop you off the balcony. One hundred and eighty floors—that’ll deactivate you.”

  “I will land on my feet.”

  “You might not.”

  “You will feel bad if I do not.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  Twenty-Eight

  What’s the difference between a pink diamond and a regular diamond?

  LEVEL THREE OF HABITAT5 is dedicated to in-house Med. Quinn has a two fifteen appointment. She’s on time but the nurse is late, so she waits in a consult room, mulling over how to explain her ailment without sounding crazy.

  The door behind her suddenly opens. “Sorry about last night— medical emergency.”

  She swings her chair around to see Hitch, wearing a white MedSuit. He’s the diagnostic nurse. Really?

  “I know why you’re here.”

  “You do?” Damage to the motor cortex and medial frontal lobe, affecting signals to my left side. He can tell that just by looking at me? He’s pretty good at his job. I’ve underestimated him.

  “Yes.” He waves her through the door and into an office. There, he opens a module, hands it to her, and sits down across from her.

  On the screen are pictures of her, a collection of thumbnails showing her movements over the last few days. Surveillance images. She’s being monitored. Personal, targeted surveillance.

  “I’m being monitored? That’s illegal. The pervasive surveillance of individuals is prohibited under Hexad conventions. They can’t do this.”

  He emits a small laugh. “No one cares.”

  “I care. Privacy matters.” She flicks through the images; pictures of her embarking and disembarking on the Hyperloop; gardening; entering and leaving her Pod; clips from her meeting at eMpower.

  Hitch holds out a hand. He wants the device back, but she’s not finished. She needs to distract him. “Medical emergency . . . what happened?” She hugs the module, opens an adjacent folder.

  “Honest, I was on call and some kid disconnected the OneHub, locked himself in his room, drank half a bottle of grain alcohol, and passed out.”

  The folder holds images from the Cloud Ship; there’s a picture of Lise and Quinn in her cloud dress, posing together. I look like a marshmallow with stick legs. “Is he okay?”

  “He’ll survive, if his mother doesn’t kill him.”

  She scans a tight shot of her diamond—just the diamond. Then another one, and one more. The weather room wasn’t a robbery. There is something going on; there’s something special about the stone.

  Hitch rises from his seat. Quinn closes the file, and he plucks the module from her hands.

  “Like your hair—sexy, suits you.”

  Compliments. Really? “I’m feeling better. Thank you.”

  She leaves.

  ***

  Harmonia has a comprehensive surveillance system and Quinn surmises that her sponsor wants to know where she is and what she’s doing. He wants to know because he has done something very stupid or highly illegal, or Mori has and Niels is protecting him. If she opens the G12, she’ll find out what it is. So they are monitoring her, keeping her here, and keeping her away from the G12. There are no images from inside her apartment Pod, so the surveillance is connected to the OneHub. If she keeps the system down, she’ll stay undetected, and so will her furry AI companion—no one needs to know about him.

  She arrives back at her Pod as a drone delivers a small package—a cactus plant, in a white pot, with a green ribbon. A gift from Hitch, a gardening reference—he’s working very hard to endear himself. Too keen, too soon. This place gives her the creeps. She leaves the plant where it’s sitting.

  Inside the Pod, Mori is in some kind of trance.

  “Hey, wake up.” She pats his head. “What’s the difference between a pink diamond and a regular diamond?”

  “Pink diamonds are pink.”

  “That’s the outcome, not the answer.”<
br />
  He stands tall and scans the space above his head, like a real meerkat. “NV,” he says.

  “Correct. Pink diamonds have a nitrogen atom instead of a carbon atom. It gives them the pink color, and they have an empty spot, a hole in the crystal lattice. The gap is NV, or nitrogen plus vacancy.” Quinn thinks. “What’s the connection between the NV and a qubit?”

  “You can make a qubit in the NV.”

  “Yes. The diamond is a storage device. What if Lise created a qubit in my diamond, entangled it with another particle in her diamond, and embedded a message in it?”

  “To read the information, you must open the diamond and extract the qubit. You will need to place it into a state of superposition. You will need a lab and a QM, a stable environment, subzero temperatures, no noise, and no movement.”

  For a person with no Coin or data, Quinn has a lot on her to-do list.

  Twenty-Nine

  Uncanny Valley.

  AT 6:00 P.M., QUINN receives an entrance request. The meerkat points to the front door.

  “I know.” She points under the bed. “Hide.”

  “Fur?” He strokes his fluffy chest.

  Fuck. “No—disappear, hide under the bed, in the storage drawer. You’re a secret; no one knows you’re here.”

  When he is safely stowed under the bed, she grants access. She was expecting Myra but Hitch enters, holding an armful of beer, a Module, and the green succulent, which he promptly hands to her. “For you. Sorry for standing you up.”

  She takes the plant. “Thanks, you really didn’t—”

  He strides into the Pod. “I’m here to help, and I have beer.” He glances around the room. “OneHub’s down. Yes?”

  She nods. “Gave it a virus.”

  “You’re clever.”

  And you’re perplexing. Why are you here?

  He unpacks the beer, waves a bottle toward her, and she takes it. Why not? It’s free, and no one here cares if she’s drunk or hung over. The best thing she can do right now is build up a tolerance for alcohol. They take their beers outside, onto the balcony.

  “Now let’s fix your community service.” Opening his module, he logs into the building interface. “What do you want to do? Communication?”

  “Climate control. I could work on the environmental system.”

  “Really? It’s quite complex, I hear the Tech’s—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” A few swipes and he’s found the page he wants. He adds her to the roster. Community service problem solved. He moves on to her arm. After scanning it with his SelfMed, he reports that there is some bruising and swelling, but nothing is broken. “MedPlan?”

  “No, and no Coin.”

  “Anything serious, there’s a MedQuarter in Unus. It’s free. Married? Boyfriend?”

  An image of Tig pops into her head, and the vision startles her. She dismisses it. “No, no. I’m single.”

  “I’m divorced. Two kids, a boy and a girl, four and six. Fucking hard work. Never doing that again.” The divorce or the kids? “I’m thirty-four, my dad’s a doctor, my brother’s a dental technician, both unemployed but getting some work in coding. Isn’t everyone?” Don’t know anyone writing code. “Coding is a holding pattern for the unemployed. My mum remarried a bureaucrat who works for New Fed. High up. That’s how I got here. Better than living outside, but it’s not perfect; the sleep zone in my apartment faces east, gets the morning sun, and I like to lie in, ease my way into the day. Why rush when every day’s the same? And the air system in my tower’s set way too high. Now that we’re friends and you’re on the climate roster, you could make some adjustments. No one needs to know.”

  “See what I—”

  “My job, it’s just a bullshit job, totally meaningless. No one would care if I didn’t turn up. No one will die if they don’t spend fifteen minutes with me. Doubt they’ll even feel better. I handle mild ailments, nervous disorders. This week’s consultations include constipation, fatigue, loneliness, bad breath, dandruff, headaches, sleep disorders, nail biting, and five patients suffering from BS.”

  “BS?”

  “Boredom syndrome.”

  Two hours later, Quinn has finished her beer and Hitch has described the last two decades of his life, in detail, and polished off eight beers. One bottle every fifteen minutes, she calculates. Time for him to leave.

  She yawns, she stretches. “Gosh, look at the time.”

  “Time to go, no problem.” He grins, tapping his bottle on the table-top, reluctant to let it go. There’s a small, but prolonged, silence, and she doesn’t offer anything else. Finally, he pushes his chair back and swoops in to kiss her, right on the mouth, enthusiastically. She fumbles and pushes him away.

  “Hey, enough,” she says. She slides off her seat and gestures toward the door. “Time for you to leave.” You’ve outstayed your welcome.

  He follows her to the entrance, then lurches toward her again.

  She dodges the advance. “Mate, fuck off.” She pushes him out the door and firmly seals it. Then she double-checks the lock, confirming he can’t return. Idiot.

  Mori bursts into the room—quivering, his hair standing on end. “Are you going to marry him?”

  “What? No.”

  “But you kissed him.”

  I’m living with a child. “He kissed me.” I’m justifying my behavior to a robot.

  “He wants to be your mate.”

  “No. He just wants to mate. Too obvious, too keen, too soon. And he couldn’t sync his Band to his module.”

  Mori is flummoxed.

  ***

  Early the next morning, Quinn finds Mori lingering beside her bed, looking disheveled. If he were human she would say he was tired and unshaven, with bags forming under his eyes.

  “You don’t look well,” she says. “Did you sleep? Do you sleep?”

  “I have a sleep mode to regulate thought patterns, consolidate and trim my memory, and process new emotions. I have a question. Why am I a meerkat?”

  He climbs onto the bed. She pushes him back.

  “Uncanny Valley. Robots that look like people freak me out.” They freak most people out.

  “I do not understand the term.”

  “It describes the dip in our emotions when we see weird or creepy things that we can’t categorize, like robots with human features. Jin, the person who created you, knows this, so she made you in the form of a meerkat because meerkats are my animal. I love them.”

  “You love them?”

  “Yes. Lise, my mother, loves lions, and my father loves birds—he’s obsessed, he even talks to them—but for me it’s meerkats. I love their cute faces and dark eyes, the way they protect and hug each other. I love the way they scan for signs of danger. They’re mesmerizing. I could watch them for hours.”

  “What makes you more human than me?”

  A bit early for this. “Gee, I don’t know. Biology. Feelings. Beliefs. Relationships. Memory. Conscious thoughts. A sense of self. Want me to go on?”

  He stares at the ground.

  “And hands, you don’t have proper hands, you can never be human without proper hands.”

  He gazes at his little paws. “Personhood, I think, is in the eyes of the beholder. John Locke said a person should have language, reason, morals, intentions, and relationships. I have intentions, and I have a relationship with you. He did not say anything about a person being biological or having hands.”

  Is he serious? “Locke, like from the eighteenth century?”

  “1687.”

  “Do you understand the notion of time? Time passes. Things have moved on a bit since Mr. Locke. And morals, beliefs, values—how do you think you got those?”

  “Some were pre-programmed, others I am learning from life, and from you. Where did you get yours?”

  “Well, yes, you have a point there. But I’m still a person, and you’re still a robot.”

  “I think, therefore I am.”

  “Is that .
. . Descartes? Are you quoting Descartes to me?”

  “Yes. Today I am developing a sense of self. I think, therefore I am.”

  “Well, I think, because I’m a Homo sapien and I can actually think, that these days, it’s more appropriate to say: ‘I am, therefore I think.’”

  “I am, therefore I think. I understand; it implies a notion of self. My control and learning systems are modeled on human brain and neuron activities. I am programmed for cognitive thought.”

  “Yes, but you process stuff; the self isn’t a process, it’s an essence.”

  “Your brain activities are processes. The brain is just a machine running inside a physical body.”

  “This is a conversation you can’t win. Understand?” She takes off her Band and hands it to him. “Now, any ideas on how I can access my data or Coin? I’m locked out.”

  “Mmmm, let me see.” He scans NIoT. “Model A2341. A rudimentary model. Not made for deep data. Given to children.”

  “Really? That simple. I just need a new model.” She straps the band back on her wrist. “What information can you access?”

  “My technology allows me to emulate brain activity in the hippocampus, so I am creating my own memories.”

  “Good to see they’re your own, but I’m talking data, information about the world, finance, companies, governments. Can you access, say, deep company data from eMpower?”

  He stands upright and scans the space above his head, the way meerkats do. She finds him impossibly cute when he concentrates.

  “NIoT. Everything that is public. Surface levels only. No deep data.”

  Quinn has Jin’s personal codes. She instructs Mori to log into eMpower using remote access and check into Jin’s personal files. She feeds him the security codes and the files open.

  “Success,” he finally says, “I have access to her personnel information.”

  “I could hug you,” she says.

  He lies down on the coffee table and holds his little paws in the air. “No, tickle me.”

  “What? No.”

  “Please, please tickle me. I tried to do it to myself, but it does not work.”

  “Oh good lordt.” She rubs his tummy, and he bursts into panting fits of laughter.